


The Madness of Cuckoos

by PepperCat



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Abusive Family Relationships, Dark, Delusions, Denial, Dysfunctional Family, Families of Choice, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kidnapping, Mental Health Issues, Negligent Homicide, Obsession, Photographs, exploiting family, grave markers, implied/referenced child murder, remembered corpse (not graphic)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 15:24:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14047182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperCat/pseuds/PepperCat
Summary: Zoey Clark has always been sure she's the mother of the Trickster's child, and always wanted a family.Axel Walker knows how to get what he wants.





	The Madness of Cuckoos

**Author's Note:**

> I usually write pieces that are fairly sympathetic to Axel. This one isn't.
> 
> I don't usually tag my fics as Dark. This one I did.
> 
> If this doesn't seem like it's to your taste, I will not mind if you don't read it!

They put him and Zoey in the back of a police car.

That was one of the first things they did to Jesse, too, the first time he came to Central-- back before the Trickster was a thing, back when he was just stopping by for a minute and trying to murder Lockhart with the mannequins and the chainsaw and the recorded applause.

It doesn't work now, either.

Axel takes care of the car while Zoey finds them another ride, and then _she_ gets to drive, which he is sulking about a little but isn't so bad once she gets going.

They're going back to her house. He remembers it from before. She's talking about how he used to sit at home, watch TV, watch his dad--

 _Sure, **mom**._ He rolls his eyes. _Dad was in jail for like six-eight years by then, but I was watching him on TV._

He doesn't mind her talking about stuff he wasn't there for--it's always been good for cues--but he'd forgotten how much it annoys him when what she's talking about is stuff about _Jesse_ that he wasn't there for, even if it wasn't real. Because someone was, probably, sometime, and he gets jealous.

Her house isn't part of Central, one of those middle-of-nowhere kinda things on a road no-one drives down that just has a box number for mail instead of a real street address. Lots of privacy, but it's not too far away with a car. Close enough she could visit and come looking.

He gets that she couldn't really go too far.

It's still dark out, but the sky's gonna start bleaching soon. The house looks... shaggy. You can see how the top windows were painted over and the bars on the ground-floor windows are getting rusty and the grass is knee-high, and when they get out then for a minute she stops and looks at it with her mouth open and a kind of lost expression and Axel feels bad for her, just a flicker.

They're both here because of his dad, and when he's gone neither of them have what they need. He gets that.

Axel touches her back gently, just between her shoulder blades. "You go on in, mom. I'll put the car away."

She nods and starts drifting forward, and that's enough to start getting her out of the fog and by the time she's reached the porch she's moving with purpose again. Axel watches her go and then gets the car into the garage. It's an old model, nothing he needs to unwire or kill to keep them from being tracked. He wonders if she knew or if she was just lucky. Zoey's cracking smart when it comes to chemistry, but she gets a bit soft-focus when it comes to dealing with how other people connect to people sometimes.

Sharp enough to find him from the message boards, though.

He flicks the last few pieces of gummy safety glass off the dash and heads inside.

She's in the kitchen, humming and not-quite-dancing around, turning from stove to table like she's wearing one of those old-fashioned skirts to go with her pearls and her old flip-end haircut and she wants to feel it swing. And she's talking like she used to when she first found him, about how it's so _good_ to see him back and he's such a _wonderful_ boy and...

Most people don't get Axel, but sometimes he likes them. Zoey Clark is something else. He gets her and she's sure she gets him and Jesse is the lynchpin of their orbits, so neither of them are moving away from the other; Jesse makes them family. But he's not sure he _likes_ her.

He's dealt with worse, though. And the pancakes are awesome. Cooking's just chemistry, right?

But she won't.

Stop.

Talking.

It gets under his skin because it keeps pointing up the crack between them, taking an almost-invisible split and widening it, roughing up the edges. Everything's getting splintery.

He wants his dad, James Jesse, and he doesn't have that. She spent twenty years wanting the Trickster, and now she thinks she's got him again.

"Hey, mom," he says, when she's on like the third run-through of the time she had to go talk to his science teacher (yeah _right_ ). "I'm going to go out back, okay?"

She gets that slow lost look on her face again, and he gets up and takes her by the elbow.

"Are you sure, Axel? We could-- go to the workshop, or watch a movie--" and he can't tell if she's zoning out 'cause he mentioned _out back_ or 'cause she's just really tired. They've been up all night, and face it, she's basically old.

But she asked, so he's got to come up with an answer that feels right enough that he can get a fucking break.

"I'm sure, mom. You go lie down, okay? I'll clean up."

"Right," she says. This close, in the kitchen light, her skin under the Prank makeup is pale and there are dark shadows sagging under her eyes. Definitely tired, whatever else is going on. "You're a good boy, Axel."

He kisses her on the temple. "Love you, mom."

It'll keep her quiet for a while.

He throws out the actual dishes, because who has time, and dumps the cutlery and pan in the sink to soak. She'll get them when she wakes up.

And he leaves the kitchen, goes to the hall that leads out back.

There are pictures on the wall--Zoey and Jesse, Zoey and Jesse and a little kid (like a _baby_ \--Axel read about that time, which was back before Jesse got caught and Zoey dropped off the face of the earth), a whole bunch with just Zoey and a kid, although which kid it is gets changed up a lot. Almost all of them are white. Some of them are even smiling like you might believe, and he grins at the frozen glossy faces.

Axel is sure--like, everyone-knows sure, not just matches-with-records-from-around-the-right-time sure--about one of their names. Joceline Kirby. Zoey picked her up from school and Joceline was either really scared or really smart and went along with things enough to last, and he thinks Zoey was having a soft-focus kind of time, because she dropped Joceline back at her school eleven days later.

_Bringing you to school..._

Axel thinks about Joceline a lot.

He knows where to find her, and sometimes he just wants to... go ask a few questions. Hear what it was like. Why she didn't stay.

But she got out.

It seems wrong to fuck with that. Usually no-one gets it, but people who get close to the whole Jesse thing, get a chance to really _see_ it, and walk away...

Her and Megan Lockhart, he wouldn't touch them.

The others are all out back. They're here on the wall too, but they're really out back.

Axel taps one of the pictures with Jesse goodbye and leaves the hall and shuts the back door behind him and goes to see the kids.

The sky's got that weird pale light to it, the colour of a lemon when all the yellow's scraped off. It's ignored land, it always was, all hillocks and dips under knee-deep grass. The dandelions'll open up when the sun rises, but right now they just break when he kicks through the stems and leave something sticky and thin on his boots.

He didn't spend a lot of time out here, because it made Zoey twitchy. But he remembers vaguely where to go, and he finds the stones. It helps that he knows what he's looking for. The grass has been growing up around them and they sink a little when it gets wet and they're not, like, _gravestones_ or anything. They're chunks of rock just small enough for one person to lug them into place and let them sink into the dirt.

He's got guesses about who some of them are, but nothing as solid as the Joceline thing. The only thing he can get from the house is pictures on the wall, no dates or anything like that, and in some of those it's hard to tell what the kids even looked like. (Nothing too weird. Just, like, coloured hair and facepaint and stuff. From playtime. Even Axel had to put up with that a couple of times before he figured out when he could push back, and he was a teenager when Zoey found him.) So it's hard to match them up with details.

Axel sits down next to a rock that he sort of thinks is either Mira Sanderlay (four and a half, went missing from a truck stop outside Keystone, summer of '01) or Donnie Koren (three weeks shy of six but small, walked away with an elf lady at the Santa grotto in Central City park back in '97). He's not sure how fast things rot in this particular chunk of land or if it was wrapped in anything that had already been eaten away or whatever, so when he dug the bits up he had to guess from the size.

He only did that once, because Zoey nearly caught him.

He never lied so hard and fast as he did then, sweat oiling the back of his neck and hands behind his back all full of dirt. He'd seen mom go soft-focus before, that thousand-yard stare so she didn't need to know what she was _doing_ when she put on one of the old tapes and acted like it was a realtime news show, but he'd never seen her look at _him_ that way before.

Like he was a job she needed to forget about doing.

He smiled until his face hurt and talked about if she remembered the time dad had promised they could play out back and how much he'd been looking forward to that and how awesome it would be when he made it back home and she sort of noticed he was there again, like _he_ was there, _properly_ , and told him to come inside.

He snuck back out again later and there wasn't a hole anymore, and the rock was back.

He was _really_ careful for like a month after that, but it never came up again.

Axel doesn't think the stones are markers, exactly, not for the kids. He thinks Zoey's really good at avoiding anything that's too much of a shock, and it'd be a shock to dig in the wrong spot and come across whatever was left of someone you maybe-sorta-not-really remembered making pancakes for and putting to bed, whether or not you had to chain them to the furniture.

He's probably good for her. He's proud of that, when he thinks about it. Mostly he's just glad she was a way for him to start writing to Jesse because he knew Jesse'd be able to write him back, but sometimes he thinks that her finding him is the reason mom stopped shopping around and finding kids that didn't _get_ it and trying with them and either fucking up or losing her temper, and that's-- like, honestly, that's probably better for everyone.

He made someone that Jesse kept around happy and he saved other kids' lives just by _existing_. He practically deserves a medal.

Axel giggles at that and kicks his heels against the ground, stretches out in the grass. The sky's brightening, getting to a proper blue, and no-one's yammering at him about what he missed, and he's not in jail.

He can cope with this. Mom wants a Trickster, and he can be that; he can play along and give her what she wants for a while until he figures out how to track down Jesse. Because Jesse is what _he_ wants, always has, and then it'll be him and his dad together again like it's meant to be.

Jesse cared. Jesse cared enough to keep writing, and to listen, and after years and fucking _years_ of Axel trying so hard to prove himself, cared enough to call him son.

That has to matter. It does.

Axel's sure of it.

**Author's Note:**

> Zoey Clark first shows up insisting that she was having James Jesse's child. We're shown a picture of her and Jesse with a child (who cannot be Axel) during their time together. Zoey Clark talked about how she was being a good parent to their child while Jesse was terrorizing Central (when Jesse would had to have been in Iron Heights).
> 
> I took from this that she's very invested in getting to be the mother in a family with the Trickster, and that her version of events doesn't match up with reality.
> 
> Axel Walker adored James Jesse, but never had a reason to believe that Jesse was his biological father.
> 
> I took from this that, growing up, his mother probably wasn't the easily-identifiable sidekick of the Trickster.
> 
> None of them need to be related to be family.
> 
> Family isn't always good.
> 
> (may include link to longer OOC discussion of what's presented on the shows later)


End file.
